Dream bikes from Jaipur

Vijay Singh’s the kind of guy who won’t shake your hand. He’s not rude or anything. Nor does he suffer from mysophobia. Quite the opposite, in fact. You’ll nearly always catch him in the middle of tinkering with a bike’s engine. He also started Rajputana Customs, a Jaipur-based brand of custom made bikes in the beginning of 2010.

“Building bikes is a serious hobby, not a viable career option,” he tells me. In fact, starting this month he’s going to help his mother run the family business – Cottons, a widely popular brand of ethnic wear for women. But this doesn’t mean he’s going to give up on the love of his life entirely. “I’ll still continue with this on a part-time basis.”

Like most boys, young and old, Singh loves bikes and the feeling he gets when he’s on one. The only difference is that when you were 6 years old your Dad probably bought you a cycle with training wheels on either side, or a battery operated car that went “peep-peep” every few seconds or so. Vijay’s father on the other hand built him his first motor bike -- a 50cc BSA Falcon.

“My whole family’s into riding bikes -- my father, my aunts, my grand uncle John Singh, who founded the Jaipur Motorcycle Club in the 1970s…. I’ve been enjoying bikes since I was 6 months old. Not that I remember it. My parents just took a lot of pictures.”

The thing about this 24-year-old is that he has the ability to spark your long forgotten passions for bikes, a quality that makes you warm to him instantly despite his refusal to shake your hand. He also loves talking about a variety of things – most frequented topics being the bikes he’s built, racing in the 75cc class on Jaipur’s motocross track (now Central Park) when he was 7 years old and the operation of building a bike from scratch.

“Its different building bikes in India as opposed to abroad where it’s more of an assembly,” he says. “You’ve got special stores that sell hubs, rims and chassis’. You even get ready made handle bars, exhausts and suspensions. Here, you’ve got to build everything from scratch because nothings that easily available in the market.”

Somehow, he doesn’t say this last bit like it’s a terrible thing. In fact, he seems positively enjoy the challenge of building something from nothing. His first bike, Original Gangster was built in 2010 as project to keep himself occupied when he moved back from Canada after completed his undergrad in Mass Communication from Carleton University. It took him six grueling months to finish his pet project despite employing the help of his father’s old mechanic. But showing me pictures on his laptop, he looks positively jubilant as he reminisces the challenges – one of them being building it “on the road… literally”.

Six months on, Singh has finished two more beautiful originals – a boat track racer for actor John Abraham named Light Foot and an old school chopper called Nandi for a Dubai-based client.

“These bikes require very standard maintenance,” he says. “In fact, they’re actually easier to maintain than other bikes because they have dry suspensions so there aren’t any oil leaks or too many hydraulic buttons.”

What’s more is that these bikes can actually be serviced at any Royal Enfield outlet in the country. But building a two wheeler to suit your tastes comes at a price – Rs. 3 to 6 lakhs if you want a ball park figure. Or more, depending on the design you pick and whether they will need to be built in Singh’s workshop or imported.

But judging from Singh’s track record, his passion for two wheelers and his self-admittedly cliché philosophy, “Four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul”, you know that Rajputana Customs is no ordinary “hobby”.

Viable option or not, it doesn’t seem likely that any enthusiast will let this 24-year-old throw in the towel until he has just given bikers the most unique steeds money can buy. After all, what’s the fun of riding with the wind like a commoner when you can ride against it on a bike built especially for you?